


Trade In These Wings On Some Wheels

by sparklyslug



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alcohol, Gen, Original Character(s), Pre-Canon, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 21:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5800078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklyslug/pseuds/sparklyslug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course Phil was going to make sure Kent was okay. Kenny was his little brother. Phil was always going to make sure he was okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trade In These Wings On Some Wheels

**Author's Note:**

> So sometimes you think, "hey my headcanons are too set in stone! Let's change it up, what if Kent had a big family of brothers?" And then it's 14k later and you're in hell. 
> 
> Thanks to defcontwo for being the best of betas, for swearing at me and accusing me of turning her to the dark side. And suggesting the title. Thanks, babe.

“Make sure he’s doing alright,” Mom had said distantly, as though she wasn’t thinking too much about it. “Las Vegas is a pretty wild city. It’s not Rimouski.”

“Get him to practice and out of the bars, man,” Ben had laughed.

“But really,” Mikey had added. “He’s sharp, but he’s gotta get sharper. It’s not the same thing, playing at the pro level.”

“Ask him if he’s looked into getting himself some kind of financial planner,” their dad had said, the beginning of a long speech on the dangers of get-rich-quick schemes, which Phil privately had thought wouldn’t be a problem for a kid who already _was_ rich quick.

“He’s okay, right?” Max had asked at least five times before Phil’d left for Vegas, sitting on the edge of Phil’s bed in the guest room as Phil had packed. “You’re going to make sure he’s okay, right?”

“Max, buddy,” Phil had said, trying to strike the right balance between casual and soothing, without veering into patronizing. “It’s Kenny. You know he’s fine, he’s always fine.”

“Not after—“ Max had stopped, his expression oddly knowing for a fourteen-year-old, “Just make sure he’s okay, Phil.”

Of course Phil was going to make sure he was okay. Kenny was his little brother. Phil was always going to make sure he was okay.

~

Still, he couldn’t help the creeping feeling of unease as his plane landed in McCarren, turning his barely-started paperback mystery over and over in his hand and looking out the window at the lights of Vegas rising up to meet him. Thinking about Kent’s face as he’d tugged the jersey for the Las Vegas Aces over his head just a few months ago, setting that smile against Max’s frown.

Kent was okay, wasn’t he? His dreams had all come true, so of course he was okay. Wasn’t he?

~

But his little brother’s there at the baggage claim carousel waiting for him, and the tightness in Phil’s shoulders eases into nothing.

Because it’s the same kid, hands in his pockets as he chats casually with a middle-aged man who’s looking at him with stars in his eyes. The Parson hair is shoved under a cap (they all have their ways of dealing with it – for the older three boys it’s a military-issue close crop, for Kenny and Max it’s hats and not giving a shit), the same apparent readiness to wear a hoodie and jeans _everywhere_ , the same big smile as he catches sight of his big brother.

“Excuse me, that’s my brother,” Phil hears him say politely to the stranger. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Good luck this season,” the guy says, only a little bit tripping over his tongue as he shakes Kent’s hand.

“I appreciate it,” Kent smiles at him, then turns and really smiles at Phil. “Hey, you made it!”

“Wasn’t too bad,” Phil says, slinging his duffle over his shoulder. “C’mere, runt, I think you’re getting shorter.”

“Fuck you,” Kent laughs, and punches Phil in the shoulder. “You’re the one who’s shrinking, old man. Gonna curl up like a little shrimp.”

“How’re you doing, Kenny?” Phil asks, abruptly breaking the rhythm of their usual bantering shit with sincerity. Uncharacteristic, but he’s got Max’s worried eyes in his head again.

Kent blinks. The closest he ever comes to flinching. “Good, man,” he says. “I’m doing good. Glad you’re here for my first game.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Phil says.

Kent’s face breaks into a smile. “Of course you wouldn’t. Let’s drop off your stuff,” he says. “Not gonna lie, my place is pretty much going to make you shit yourself.”

There’s a Lincoln town car waiting for them at the curb, the driver humming along to some pop country, nodding companionably at Kent as he slides into the back seat.

“I appreciate the red carpet treatment, but I was hoping to get a look at your ride,” Phil says.

“What ride?” Kent leans back in the seat, cracking the window an inch despite the blasting AC.

“Don’t you have a car of your own yet?”

Kent shrugs. “Been busy, man.”

Phil snorts. “Yeah, sure. But isn’t that like, the thing to do? Sign the contract, deposit the check, buy some huge Hummer, or something? Benny’s going to be heartbroken, he’s been trying so hard not to ask you if you went for a Porsche for months.”

“Guess it is the thing to do,” Kent says thoughtfully, picking up on the least important part of what Phil had said (the most important obviously being ‘Porsche’). “I should probably do it, then.”

“We can do it while I’m out here,” Phil offers, casually. “Maybe this afternoon, if you don’t have to go do anything before the game?”

“There’s a red carpet thing before warmups, but that’s not until 4,” Kent says, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “I was sort of thinking I’d wait—“

“For what?” Phil laughs. “For a raise? You can do it, Kenny, you can go out and get yourself a car. You’ve worked hard, you’ve earned it. You’ve gotta treat yourself, man.”

Kent snorts. “Okay, yeah, sure. Why not, I guess. Let’s do it.”

~

Phil knows about Jack Zimmermann. They all know about him, that Kent’s friend up in Canada had cracked under the pressure three months ago. Some sort of drug thing, right before the draft.

Phil hadn’t heard this from Kent himself. Far as he knows, the only person Kent had told directly was their mom. She’d told the rest of them, in the following weeks. Far as he knows, Kent had barely talked to anyone apart from their mom in that time.

He’d tried. But email was about the limit of what he could manage, from Kuwait. And Kent hadn’t really ever been great with email.

It had been the worst possible timing for Kenny. It was horrible in and of itself, of course. It had to have been a real shock, really upsetting. Especially if Kent didn’t see it coming. That kind of thing is really tough on a kid.

But on top of that, it was the beginning of Kenny’s leap into the NHL. He was wrung out after the combine, running in circles with the media, and then the draft itself. And the kid hadn’t even had time to unwind after that, because there had been prospects camp and more events, with training and then officially signing with the Aces, and launching right into the preseason, all in a matter of months.

So Phil doesn’t know details. He’s lost friends, but he’s not an 18-year-old kid, far from home and in the intense pro-track world of hockey. He didn’t know how Kent was doing immediately after, and isn’t sure how he’s doing now.

But Kenny, he’s a tough kid. He always has been. You have to be, growing up in a house like theirs. Mom and Dad, well, they’re busy, they’ve got their own lives to lead. Even more so after they’d managed to land the kind of job that kept them all in one place, not moving around all the time like they did when Phil, Ben, and Mike were kids. And Phil did his best, to make up for it, but he was off to basic training before Kenny was ten.

For a little guy with big goals, it wasn’t easy. But Kenny made it happen.

“None of this would have happened for me without the support and sacrifices of my family,” Kent’s said to reporters, and none of his family had corrected him.

“We mostly raised ourselves, and then Phil did the rest,” Mikey had said once to a friend, and Phil had wished it was the truth.

~

Max is the only one who was home when Kent was playing up in Canada, going to high school far from home and living with strangers in order to make it all happen. Max is the only one who was young enough to go along with their parents when they managed to catch a game. Max is the only one who’s met Jack Zimmermann. He’s the only one who actually saw the two of them play together.

“It was really cool,” Max had said over the phone to Phil, after. “They’re really—uh, they’re really good.”

“And what’s he like in person? Kenny says he’s a weird guy.”

“Yeah?” Max paused. “A little weird, I guess. I don’t know. Kent likes him.”

It was exactly as easy to tell when Max was hiding something, as it was impossible to get him to reveal what that something was. Phil didn’t bother to try and pry it out of him, since it was probably only a big deal if you were an impressionable and melodramatic thirteen-year-old. He let it drop.

~

Kent’s apartment doesn’t make Phil shit himself, but probably just because the military trains that sort of thing out of you.

It’s not technically his apartment, not yet, fresh as he is right from the draft. Rookies tend to room up with older players on the team, find their feet, have a responsible older presence to give them some stability and guidance.

“Stability” isn’t exactly what Phil’s getting from this place, a five-bedroom suite that’s got to be twice the size of his and Rachel’s house in Florida. He meets Jeff, this mentor figure who’s going to ease Kent into Vegas life, and is alarmed to realize that the guy’s only 26 himself, and younger than Phil. He’s a nice guy, shakes Phil’s hand and says it’s good to meet him, accent thick with a Southern drawl (“you can go from West Texas all the way to the NHL, if you’re just the right kind of crazy,” Jeff tells him with a grin), but he’s still basically a kid.

“It’s a young team,” Jeff says, almost apologetically. “Haven’t even been at it for five years. I’m as close to a wise old man as we’ve got.”

In the bathroom adjacent to his guest room, Phil stares at the multiple heads and array of knobs in Kenny’s shower, and is struck for the first time by the fact that Kent Parson, his little brother, is a wealthy man. Sure, all this isn’t technically _his_. But it could be, this or something or very like it. This first contract he’s signed is just that, a starter, and by all reports his next one will make this one look like pocket change.

He’s known it before, of course. The whole family knows how many zeroes came into play when he signed that contract a month and a half back. But it’s one thing to think about a string of numbers, and another thing entirely to be standing in an apartment which could contain the house he shares with Rachel twice over.

Hard to take in, when he’s looking at a practical forest of nozzles and sternly telling himself that it would be ridiculous to ask Kent to explain his monster of a shower to him, _again_. Phil’s dismantled bombs, for God’s sake. He should be able to handle this.

Eventually, and with a minimum of yelping at scalding hot water, he does. He steps out of the guest room to see Kent doing some weird dance with his phone at the mammoth kitchen table. Pick it up, look at it, put it down. Pick it up, thumb at it for a second, then push it away from him.

Kenny looks up, and a hard wall behind his eyes falls away.

“You ready?”

“You expecting a call?” Phil asks instead of answering, rubbing at his hair with a towel.

“Uh,” Kent shrugs. “I mean, kind of.”

“Thought you said you didn’t have to be at the stadium until four?”

“I did,” Kent says, getting to his feet. “And I do. You going to keep blabbing about my calendar, or are we going to go spend some of my money?”

Phil throws an arm over Kent’s shoulders, crushing him against his side for a moment. “Hey, if anyone’s going to, it’s gotta be you, right?”

“Damn right,” Kent says, shoving Phil off of him. He glances one more time at the screen of his phone before sliding it into his pocket.

~

The politics of who got a ride were a never-ending subject of wheeling and dealing in the Parson house. Dad used his car to take Mom to work every morning, and then drove to his office. No plans could rely on it until after 7 p.m. most nights, closer to 9 or 10 if it was poker night.

They all had their different strategies. Phil struck early and fast, even before his plans were concrete. Ask Dad on Wednesday if you could use the car on Friday, and he’d remember and honor it, and be quietly pleased that you were planning ahead so well. Ben relied on friends for the peak weekend times, but struck for the less popular earlier in the week days, and coped with the ensuing Wednesday morning hangovers in homeroom. Mikey tended to ask last-minute, Ben and Phil’s plans falling apart often enough that it paid off as a strategy pretty well.

Kenny rarely ever asked for the car. He didn’t rely on the rotating machinations of the family at all, and instead seemed to have worked out some sort of carpool situation for himself with teammates.

It never occurred to Phil to ask, when he was home. Kent would just come in, bulging bag over his shoulder, sweaty and tired but with the quiet contentment that Phil remembered with a pang, taking him back to his own once-upon-a-time boneless satisfaction after a good football practice.

“Hey Phil,” Kent would say, voice cracking and eyes bright, always sounding delighted and surprised to find his big brother still sitting at the kitchen table. “What’re you doing tonight? I just gotta shower, but I can come too.”

Always “I can come,” and never “can I come?” And taking it with a shrug and a grin, whenever the answer was “fuck no, runt.”

Phil never thought about it, how late it got sometimes. How long it would have taken Kent to get home from the rink, if he’d gotten a ride the whole way there. And how long it would have taken Kent to walk, if there was no one around to drive him.

~

Kent’s already summoned the town car (same smiling driver, same pop country), and it’s waiting for them in front of his building. Kent waves at the doorman, the desk staff downstairs, and everyone knows his name.

Phil tries not to look too weirded out by every “Mr. Parson,” but it’s a struggle each time.

It was one thing to know this intellectually, that Kent’s life is a big deal to people, when he was on the other side of the country, on the other side of the world. It’s another thing to see men three times Kent’s age look at him like he’s some kind of awe-inspiring demigod.

“So what’re you thinking?” Phil says instead.

“Hmm?” Kent says absently, thumbing at his phone as he settles into the seat next to Phil.

“What kind of car, man?”

“I don’t know,” Kent says, not meeting Phil’s eyes.

“Sure, right,” Phil laughs. “Come on, runt. It’s not a big question. You’ve gotta have something in mind, right? Lambo? Ferrari? What kind of car are you thinking of?”

“Maybe I’ll be just like my big brother, get ready for family life, get myself a soccer mom minivan,” Kent says, a wicked edge to his grin.

“Oh, really?” Phil tucks that one away to tell Mom later. “Anyone I should know about?”

“No,” Kent turns his grin out to the window, and Phil can’t see anymore whether the impish glee is still anywhere in it. “I was just kidding, there’s no one important.”

 _Typical Kenny_ , Phil thinks fondly, _always too serious for girls_ , but he lets the subject drop. “Well, after a minivan—which is, for the record, a very manly and responsible choice—what’re you thinking?”

“Sure, sure,” Kent snickers. “I don’t know. I mean— it’s a big deal. Picking a car. That’s like. That’s pretty real.”

“Your life is pretty real, Kenny,” Phil says, trying for casual as he turns in his seat to catch a glimpse of the fountain in front of the Bellagio, before they’re whipping past it.

“Not that real,” Kenny scoffs. “Not like what you do. Not like Benny, and Mikey. It’s just a game.”

“If you believed that,” Phil turns back around to look straight at him, “you never would have made it as far as you have. It’s not the same as what we do, but that doesn’t make it any less real or impressive, Kent.”

Kent takes his phone out of his pocket again, but doesn’t look at it. He turns it over in his palm, his eyes focused somewhere over the driver’s shoulder.

“I mean it,” Phil says. “You can be proud, of what you’ve done. You should be proud. Especially—“

Phil trails off, already mentally berating himself. Almost thirty and he can still talk himself into an awkward silence, useless as ever when he can’t fall back on the military jargon, just like Rachel says.

“Especially what?” Kent asks, leaning forward, bracing his elbows against his knees.

Phil shrugs, knowing as he does it that it’s not enough. “I know it’s been a hard few months. You’ve had a lot to deal with. With the NHL and with—with everything else.”

“I’m fine,” Kent says, before the last word has fully cleared Phil’s mouth, with a practiced smile. “It’s been up and down, I won’t lie. But I’m excited for all of this. I’m ready.”

“Yeah?” Phil asks.

Kent looks at him, the perfect smile an unwavering white line of teeth. “Sure,” he says. “Sure I am.”

He settles in the seat next to Phil, turns his attention fully to his phone. Phil looks at his bowed head, the lock of hair escaping out from under the brim of his snapback. His little brother’s broad shoulders, how strong he looks in every muscle and sinew of him, and how young he still is when he finally looks up to meet Phil’s eye again.

“Maybe a pickup,” Kent says, natural and casual as anything.

“What?”

“A truck,” Kent says. “A big old flatbed, you know?”

“Going to get into construction?” Phil says, trying to catch up with Kent’s casual tone.

“Ha ha,” Kent punches Phil in the shoulder, and it actually stings. “Come on. A big flatbed, a cab in the back, the kind of thing you can just take out to the edge of nowhere, bring a few beers, lie back and chill, right?”

 _You can’t drink_ , Phil thinks. _You said there was no one_ , he thinks.

“You live in the desert, Kenny,” is what he says.

Kent shrugs, grins over at him. “Vegas winter’s a lot more hospitable than up in Canada, man. I think I can handle it.”

~

“You want to take my car out this weekend, Kenny?” Phil’d asked once, when he was home and Kent was fifteen. “Maybe you’ve got someone to take out, huh? She’d dig seeing you in a car, right?”

Kent had blinked. The closest he ever came to flinching. “I’m not,” Kent had snapped. “I’ve got practice and a game tomorrow, I’ve got no time for girls.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Kenny,” Ben moaned, pausing his Mortal Combat rampage to press a hand over his eyes. “If not now, when? If you won’t uphold the Parson legacy for laying pipe, who will? Sure as shit won’t be Mikey the monk over here.”

Mikey threw his controller at Ben with a perfect QB spiral, nailing him right in the middle of his forehead. Ben howled.

No one laughed louder than Kent.

~

The Ford dealership is a mercifully air-conditioned indoor space, and Phil is spared the embarrassment of sweating himself into a puddle when he’s supposed to be the adult here, the one who’s actually bought a car before. He lives in _Florida_ now, what the fuck, he thought he could handle the heat.

“You’ve got people who could do this for you, right?” Phil asks, brushing a hand over his forehead in a holdover gesture from the years when he didn’t wear his blonde hair cropped close to the scalp.

“Handlers?” Kent says vaguely, peering at the dashboard of a showroom model. “Yeah, tons. Anything I want, they can get for me pretty easy.” He says it the way Phil might say ‘for breakfast I had eggs,’ just as absent-minded a statement of uninteresting fact.

“So why didn’t you? Since you’re so _busy_ , and everything.”

“Fuck off,” Kent says easily. “I don’t know, some things you just want to do yourself, you know? Like when we were growing up.”

“I don’t think Mom and Dad ever just rolled up to a dealership and bought something right off the floor,” Phil says. “Not ever something they could’ve afforded.”

“Yeah,” Kent flicks a finger against the rearview mirror of the truck in front of him, examines his reflection in it. “Exactly.”

Phil’s considering how to answer when they’re approached by a perfectly coiffured woman in her upper 40s, crisp and neat in a dark blue blazer.

“Afternoon, gentlemen,” she says, mostly to Phil. “Welcome to Ford, my name’s Sarah. Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“He is,” Phil says as Kent straightens and turns, his brother offering a lazy grin. “Thinking of a pickup, huh?”

“Oh,” clearly a professional, Sarah’s surprise is quickly covered by a smile. “Win big today, hmm?”

Kent grins, all charm and teeth and dimples. “I’ve had a good few weeks in town, yeah.”

“Congratulations,” she says, with a smile to rival Kenny’s. “And good for you, not heading right to the next table. You never know when your luck’s going to turn, hmmm?”

Kent laughs. “Too true,” he says. “Way too true.” He turns to run a hand over the gleaming red hood of the truck next to them. “What can you tell me about this one? I’m looking for something hardy, something all-weather, something with a lot of space that goes fast.”

~

Kenny fell for hockey hard, fast, and before any of them could even notice what was happening.

“You want to watch what?” Phil had asked, frowning over at his little brother.

Kent, eight years old and usually prone to addressing his brother (ancient at 18) in an awestruck whisper, crossed his arms and puffed out his chest, levelling a severe green-eyed glare at Phil.

“Rangers and Islanders,” he said. “I gotta watch it, Phil. Come on.”

“Sure, big man,” Phil said, because he admittedly had just got home from Nicole’s where he’d got maybe a little too cross-faded, and he wasn’t absolutely married to the Bills vs Cubs game he was planning on watching anyway.

Kent had just nodded, taken the spot next to Phil, but remembered his place in the TV pecking order enough to tell Phil what channel he wanted rather than grabbing the remote out of his hand.

“So, hockey?” Phil had asked, as the announcers babbled their pre-game analysis, Kent watching and nodding as though all the nonsense about shots on goal and hits and power play kills were at all English.

“I love it,” Kent had said breathlessly, and then smiled at him. “Phil, it’s the _best_.”

Phil watched Kent as much as he watched that first game, and wondered how the hell he had managed to miss this little kid learning so much about a sport _none of them_ had any interest in before.

~

Sarah steps away to get the keys so they can take the big truck for a test drive. Phil had watched for a reaction when she’d taken Kenny’s license to get photocopied, but there had been nothing.

“Not a lot of in-between out here, huh?” Phil says.

Kenny’s fiddling with his phone again, and doesn’t look up. “With what?”

“NHL superstar Kent Parson,” Phil laughs, and Kent looks sharply up at him.

“What do you mean?”

“She totally didn’t recognize you,” Phil says. “That was almost weirder to see than you getting chatted up by strangers at the airport.”

“Oh,” Kent taps his phone against his thigh. “That. Yeah, it’s either one way or the other, I guess. People know all about me or they don’t know anything about me. I’m kind of used to it though, I guess.”

“Really?”

Kent snorts, tucks his phone back in his pocket so he can take off his snapback, run a hand through his hair. “Don’t sound so shocked, dude. Kind of story of my life. For the past few years, anyway.”

“Oh,” Phil says. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Kent stares at him. “Why would you be sorry?”

Phil squints across the showroom, eyes on the family of four who actually _have_ probably just won big, if their shared wide-eyed shell-shocked looks are anything to go by. The smallest girl touches a green sedan as though she’s expecting her hand to pass right through it, like a mirage.

“For missing it,” he says, simply. “For not being there. When your—when that started.”

Kent looks away, but Phil can see the tips of his ears go pink. “Shut up, man,” Kenny says. “It’s fine. It’s not that big a deal, really. I dealt. I got used to it.”

“You shouldn’t have had to deal and get used to it,” Phil says, an unhappy weight dragging at his chest. “Not alone, not as young as you were, not so far from—“

“Holy shit, where is this coming from?” Kent turns to face him squarely, narrowing his eyes at him, pulling himself up to his full height. “Strangers started knowing my name when I was thirteen years old, Phil. I was young, yeah, but I was still home. I was never alone, and I was never scared. Never, okay? Juniors was—the Q was hard, I’m not going to lie, but I wasn’t alone then either.”

Kent takes a deep breath, and his posture loosens a little. He still looks evenly into Phil’s face, the quiet gravity of his expression suddenly so clearly something he got from Mom. Phil feels even more thrown.

“It’s been that way long enough for me to get used to it, is what I’m saying,” Kenny says. “You’ve got the pockets of nerds who know all my stats, all my history, who’ve got, like, bets on when I’ll score my first NHL goal. And then there’s the rest of the world, who don’t see anything other than this,” he gestures vaguely at his face, hand sweeping down to encompass the sweatshirt, the Aces t-shirt under it, the jeans and unremarkable sneakers.

“And it’s not bad,” Kent says, finishing the gesture by shoving both hands in his pockets, all trace of their mother vanishing as his shoulders hunch and he’s eighteen years old again. “Being reminded that the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit who I am.”

His attention snags on something over Phil’s shoulder, so Phil turns to follow his gaze. He almost misses what Kent says next as he watches Sarah approach them with a cheery wave, keys in one hand.

“Feels nice,” is what he hears, addressed to his back. “Good to know I still have that option.”

~

There was only so present Phil could be, once he left home. But he knew things were happening for Kenny, young as he was.

“Things’re really happening for K-man,” Ben had told him via e-mail. “He’s babysitting on overdrive paying for his gear, because his coach thinks it’s worth it if he wants to try out for this peewee team in Buffalo.”

“Yeah, Kenny’s good,” Mikey had said over the phone, connection warbly and damp-sounding stretched over something like seven time zones. “He’s got an actual fucking agent, can you believe it? He got scouted, and everything. Like a movie star.”

“Kenny’s so busy,” Max said, a sulky edge to his tone. “He’s never around to play anymore. When he is, he’s like, super tired.”

“We’re doing all we can for him, but you know how it is,” Mom said, sounding worn-out.

“I can’t get to a game until next month, but he says the team’s been doing real well,” Dad said, sounding a little guilty.

“I’m great!” Kenny said. “I’m really great, Phil. We keep winning, it’s _crazy_.”

“It’s not too hard?” Phil asked, trying to force the scattered pixels of the video call to resolve themselves into a clearer shot of Kenny’s face, trying to piece together the truth behind the smile in his voice.

The snort that came through was crystal-clear. “Come on,” Kenny said. “Of course it’s _hard_. That’s not the _point_. I just have to keep going, keep fighting, right? That’s what you always tell me.”

“Yeah man,” Phil said, fond and proud. “You’ve got it.”

~

The Ford is huge, a big old flatbed as well as a second row of seats, which Kent seems to find very key, for reasons that Phil can’t even begin to guess at.

“This is a _car_ ,” Kent keeps saying, twisting the wheel for a turn and grinning over at his blindspot. “This is a fucking _car,_ man.”

It certainly has four wheels and an engine, but Phil’s heart is still a little broken from how they passed the Porsche dealership without even a hint of interest on Kenny’s part.

“I’m guessing you wouldn’t go for the blue, though,” Phil says, examining the dashboard dials.

Kent gives the matter some serious consideration. “Don’t think so. Could go with red or black for the team colors. I’m leaning towards the black.”

“What have the other rookies grabbed?”

Kent shrugs.

“Seriously?”

“I don’t know, it hasn’t come up,” Kent says easily, no edge to it at all, smooth and polished.

“New cars haven’t come up,” Phil says, his own tone a lot more flat. “With a bunch of guys. All under the age of 25. Who just got the mother of a first paycheck.”

“What can I tell you, Phil, it hasn’t come up,” Kent says, a little sharper.

He can take that to mean what it usually has meant, with Kent. There’s a disappointed pang under Phil’s ribs, though perhaps it was stupid to hope that things would be different for Kent here. That maybe Kent would be a little different here.

“What about your roommate?” Phil tries one last time.

“Jeff?” Kent shrugs. “He might have got a car. I think he already had one.”

“You guys carpool in to practice sometimes?”

“Not really,” Kent says. But there is a definite edge in Kent’s tone now, his voice going a little low and slow like it does just before Kent snaps. Phil doesn’t ask further, doesn’t offer that Jeff had seemed nice, doesn’t ask if Kent had ever _asked_ if the guy wanted to drive in together.

Phil’s trying to think what else he shouldn’t ask, and what might be safe to venture, when Kent’s phone buzzes from its temporary home in the cup holder. Kent’s eyes flash down to it, his hands jerking on the wheel for a second, the car making a sharp swerve over into the (mercifully empty) right lane.

“Oh,” Kent says, as Phil says “ _Hey_!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Kent says, half an eye on the road if he’s watching it at all, one hand already making a terrifying move off the wheel and towards the phone. “I’ll just—“

The screen’s lit up with what looks like a Google alert, like the one Phil has set up for Kent’s name and for Ben and Mikey’s units. Which is maybe what makes Kent’s hand pause halfway there, hanging in the air over his thigh as though Kent’s forgotten what he was doing with it.

What he was doing with it was driving a car. A car that’s still in motion. Which he doesn’t even own.

Phil snatches up the phone, and Kent really does take both eyes off the road.

“Give me—“

“You can pull over or I can read it to you, but Jesus Christ, just get your eyes on the road.”

Kent actually does, though his eyes have gone very bright, looking very green in that moment, set against the muted orange and beige of the Nevada suburban houses that’ve begun to crop up this far out from the casinos.

“I—“ Kent says, eyes darting back and forth across the two lanes in front of him as though Phil’s presented him with a bewildering array of options, rather than just the two. “Uh. I should—“

Phil makes the call. He turns the phone over in his hands and looks at the screen, reading the brief message before Kent’s strangled noise of panic even clears his throat.

“‘Jack Zimmermann released from rehab—‘” Phil doesn’t miss the way Kent’s elbows lock, how he pushes himself back against the seat as though the car had just made fucking warp speed. It hasn’t. It’s clipping along this highway now at an impressively even pace and in a completely straight line. “‘home with family in Montreal and doing—‘ Kenny, seriously, you can pull over.”

“Made it this far,” Kent says, a distant note to his voice, but there’s a smile growing on his face, and he’s shaking his head. “I _knew_ it, I could practically _feel_ it, I—yeah, just read the whole thing, Phil, why not.”

Phil thumbs open to the article, glances over the image of Jack Zimmermann (a few months old, since he’s wearing his Team Canada World Juniors jersey, standing alone in the frame in a posed publicity still, no Kenny in sight) and to the body text.

“Zimmermann’s agent Paul Marchant released a statement this morning that Zimmermann has successfully completed his stay at the Dominican Heart Clinic, and has returned to the home of his parents, Alicia and Bob Zimmermann, outside of Montreal. Zimmermann was admitted in early June, and completed the two-month rehabilitation program, though Marchant did not specify what Zimmermann was—“

The car slows, stops, and Phil looks up. Kent’s slid to the right shoulder so seamlessly that Phil hadn’t registered the shift, and is now sitting with his hands still on the wheel, staring out at the road.

“How many months?”

“What?”

“How many—how long did they say? He just got out today, right? Why else would they—“

“Last month,” Phil says. It tastes like bad news, even if he doesn’t know why. “Or—well, he got out late August. That’s what it says.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

He checks the article again. “It’s what it says, Kenny.”

“It doesn’t make _sense_ ,” Kent yanks the car into park, and twists to grab the phone out of Phil’s hand.

“Why wouldn’t it make sense?” Phil says to the top of Kent’s head, bent over the phone and reading the article for himself now. “Rehab programs are usually that long, maybe three months, but not—“

“Stay here,” Kent says, not looking at Phil and hopping out of the car, slamming the door behind him. His phone is pressed to his ear before he’s even made it around to the front of the truck. Phil can guess who he’s calling, he thinks.

Quiet falls inside the truck. The motor purrs around him, the A/C hitting somewhere around his sternum, though sweat’s still beading at his temples and the back of his neck, maybe just in sympathy from watching Kent pace out into the desert sunlight.

The only concession Kent makes is to flip his hat around brim-forward, shading his eyes as he waits for an answer. He turns away from Phil and the truck, puts his back to his brother, but Phil sees it when his shoulders drop, his head bows. Answering machine, then. Kent’s free hand comes up to cover his mouth as he starts to talk, or maybe to screen some of the road noise, make it sound like this message isn’t coming from the side of a highway.

A car zips by, and Phil feels the truck rock gently with the force of their speed a second before he sees the wind catch at the hem of Kenny’s button-down, knock him a little to the side, for all that he’s got more muscle mass now than Phil’s ever seen on him.

Kent seems to finish speaking, and slowly lowers the phone. His head lifts, tilts from one side of the road to the other, up to the sky. Then back down to the phone in his hand. He raises it, presses it to his ear again.

Phil looks at his own hands. And keeps looking at them, until the driver’s door opens again and Kent hauls himself back up into the seat, easing the phone into the pocket of his hoodie.

“Kenny—“

“It’s all good,” Kent says. The brim of his hat masks his eyes as he leans in to put the car into gear again. “I was just surprised. Figured I’d hear from him earlier, that’s all.”

“So you talked to him?” Phil asks. He has an answer when Kent looks at him at last, hollow-eyed behind the smile, his face pale in the shadow cast by his hat.

“Nah,” Kent says. “And probably won’t. His mom says he doesn’t—hasn’t wanted to talk. Won’t want to.”

He looks at Phil for a long moment. Still smiling, eyes still empty of anything to do with that smile, their shade sunk into a dark grey. It’s the most ghoulish expression Phil’s maybe ever seen. And he can’t think of a thing to say to it.

“Yeah,” Kent says, finally. “Well. Sucks.”

And he roars back onto the highway.

~

Phil knew that Jack Zimmermann was a big deal, because he actually knew his name.

Kent had friends. Obviously, Kent had friends. He went out to the houses of other guys, stayed late after school, was invited to parties and movies and everything else he should have been doing as a kid. Was close to his team, was a leader, was the type of guy that everyone just _liked_.

So it took a little time, to realize what was really going on. It took the arrival of Jack Zimmermann, to be honest, to trace back over Kent’s friendships and see the pattern.

Kent had friends. Obviously. But Phil had never met them. Phil had never really heard their names. As far as Phil knew, after he moved out, Kent had never had a friend over to their house.

He’s mentioned it to Ben, once. Ben had rocked back, was halfway through a “—Come on, no, that’s not…”

But Ben had trailed off. Ben had thought about it too. Ben had frowned, the expression downright uncomfortable and unfamiliar on his face.

“Well, shit,” Ben had said.

Phil gets a few chances to watch Kent, the next few times the both of them are back in New York. Gives him rides to practice, out to dinner afterwards with the team. Kent’s one thing on the ice – smooth and sure and decisive, the puck seeming to come to him exactly when and how he needs it. And he’s that off the ice too, laughing over pizza and snorting into his soda. But there’s hesitation there, a little.

On the rides home, he’s tired. He’s more tired than he is after a game.

~

Phil tries not to read too much about Kent’s hockey career. Not least because he can only understand about two-thirds of it, even after all these years. But he’s absorbed this much: everyone in the hockey world wants to see what the number one draft pick, this potential “generational talent,” is going to do.

And they want to see it tonight.

The Las Vegas Aces seem to occupy a tiny pocket universe of their own. As close as a block away from the arena, no one seems to even know that they’re there. The new arena pulls double duty as an events space, sure, but there’s no shortage of those in Vegas already, no shortage of anything in Vegas already. In the broad scheme of Las Vegas, hockey is a laughably small blip.

And yeah, it’s not like the Aces are any good. If they were, they’d never have been able to nab Kent Parson. Which is some kind of irony or something, Phil thinks.

So excitement is both extremely high, and not high at all. And it’s an odd thing, to take his seat at the season opener and see that many of the seats around him, prime seats that they are, are still empty.

He knows how many seats could have been made available for the Parson family, too. It doesn’t make him feel much less uncomfortable about that, to be surrounded on all sides by empty seats, emphasizing that he’s the only one who made it.

Maybe the numbers aren’t stunning, but the atmosphere is still crackling and festive. It’s been a strong preseason, the team’s numbers are already clambering well about where they were this time last year, and Kent has stepped into a leading role as far as that goes. Six games, two assists, one point – that’s not nothing, for his first season.

The opener’s against New Jersey, which doesn’t bring in much of a rivalry angle to the game (from what Kent’s said, that dubious honor seems to go to Colorado and, for some reason, Seattle), but the stadium’s full of happy chatter anyway, a sea of black jerseys, and the crowd roars just as loud as a sold-out house as the pre-game lights show starts to dance across the ice in a shower of spades.

The anthem’s sung, the puck’s dropped, and Kent Parson’s begun his career in the NHL.

~

When it happens, it’s almost too quick to see. A dark shape with a 90 on his back and Phil’s own name across his shoulders breaks free of a knot of players, streaks down the ice towards the Devils’ goalie. Kent’s alone out there, a defender close on his left shoulder but too slow to keep up, another coming in from the right but at the wrong angle to really get in Kent’s way, and with a quick flick of a fake the goalie is pulled to the right, Kent weaves left, and—scores.

Phil’s seen Kent score before. It’s a little different every time, the immediate post-goal rush. As a little guy Kent tended to jump in the air, probably a holdover from football, and would usually fall back to the ice right on his ass. Not that that ever broke his smile. He’s seen Kent go in for two upraised fists, both arms outspread for a while after the first time he’d seen “Gladiator,” even just a quick fist-pump before he was enveloped by a pack of teammates.

This time, for his first NHL goal, Kenny doesn’t do much of anything.

He glides to a halt more than he actually stops, his head tilted up, though he’s turned away from the Jumbotron and doesn’t seem to be looking for anything specific in the crowd. Phil can’t see his face, through the standing fans and the Aces rushing towards him. But the set of Kent’s shoulders doesn’t look right.

The first teammate crashes into him from behind, knocking his stick out of slack fingers. It spins out onto the ice. For a sick moment Phil reads the angle of Kent’s body, thinks he’s just _letting_ the impact of the hug take him right to the ice, but then number 31 is coming at him from the front, arms up, and the force of that collision seems to correct Kent’s course and keep him upright.

Phil’s almost sick with relief when he sees Kent’s arms come up around his teammate, when the next look at his face makes it clear that he’s grinning ear to ear. Whatever moment it was, it was just a moment. It had passed. And Kenny is fine. More than fine, he’s on top of the world.

~

The after party has been going for hours, about four more hours than Phil’s really been up for it, and he can’t find Kent anywhere. It’s not like the apartment is _that_ big. It certainly doesn’t feel as big as it had this morning, before it was full of hockey players, fans, women, and plenty of people who don’t seem to really know _why_ they’re celebrating, just that they are.

Phil retreats into the guest room when he finally gives up trying to pick Kent out of the crowd, pulling out his phone and locking the door behind him. It’s not quite at that point yet, but he wouldn’t be overwhelmingly surprised to find strangers in a few of Kenny and Jeff’s extra rooms.

A second after he’s put the phone to his ear, he hears an instrumental jingle vaguely recognizable as “Thunder Road” coming from somewhere nearby. Coming from— he whips his head around the room— from behind the curtains, in front of what he had assumed was just a window.

It isn’t. There’s a balcony out there, and on the balcony is his little brother.

Kent’s leaning forward to pick up his phone when Phil sticks his head out of the door, caught before Phil could see if he’d take or reject the call.

The brothers regard each other for a second. Phil steps out onto the balcony.

“Didn’t know this was out here,” Phil says.

Kent blinks, and raises a finger to his lips. “It’s a secret,” he says, and laughs.

It’s not really much of a balcony, now that Phil gets a look at it. It’s really only wide enough for the lawn chair Kent’s sitting in, broad enough for Phil to have one hand on the railing and the other on door back inside. The window faces away from the Strip, the building close enough to the beginning of actual desert that there’s only a short spread of lights glimmering below them, fading out into the odd twinkle of highway lights, and then blackness, and what stars can shine through the light pollution of the city.

Kent’s still in his game day suit, or what had once been his game day suit. The vest and Aces-scarlet tie have vanished, and his jacket is long gone. He’s pushed the sleeves of his white button-down up over his elbows, buttons undone past the neckline of his black undershirt. With all those subtractions, there’s only one addition: an Aces snapback, backwards and with a few strands of blonde hair defying gravity and escaping out from under the brim.

He’s somewhat inexplicably tucked into what looks like the kind of flimsy tin and plastic beach chair that you find in drug stores, knees practically touching his chest. He looks like some sort of religious icon or statue, with the clear bottle between his legs, three dark shapes arranged in a rough semicircle in front of him. The rectangle to the left of him is his phone, gone dark now that Phil’s hung up, and the circle to his right is the puck he used to score his first goal in the NHL, edged with white athletic tape and words in silver Sharpie marker. The third, forming a direct line from the bottle to Kent, is a square black box that Phil can’t identify.

“What’re you doing out here?” Phil asks, easing himself to a crouch in front of Kent.

“You know,” Kent says, and extends a bottle towards Phil. “Celebrating.”

Phil takes the bottle, angling the red label towards the light coming through the door behind him to see that it’s Smirnoff, straight vodka, and it’s around three-quarters of the way to empty. Kent lurches up a little to slide his phone back into his pocket, before settling back into his seat and smiling at Phil.

“Help yourself,” Kent says. “Got plenty more inside.”

“I’m good,” Phil says, because he’s had his standard two beers and is less and less interested in going beyond that tonight. “But thanks.”

Kent reaches for the bottle, and Phil gives it back without hesitation. And wonders, as soon as the glass is out of his hand, if that was a bad call.

“You okay, Kenny?”

“Okay?” Kent laughs. “You see that party in there? You see that game? Of course I’m okay. I fucking showed them, Phil.”

He could point out that ‘okay’ doesn’t exactly add up to Kent hidden away with a bottle of vodka, but Phil knows his brother well enough to guess that pointing this out won’t get him anywhere.

“Showed them what?”

Kent snorts. “That I’m first for a reason. That I’m—that I’m fucking first for a reason. That that’s mine.”

“Of course it’s yours,” Phil says, bewildered. “What’re you talking about? Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because it’s supposed to be his,” Kent mumbles to the label of his bottle, running a thumb over the silver foil. “That’s not— that’s what they think. Not what I think. I know it’s mine. I know that.”

Phil’s knee has started to play up, so he’s easing his way into a position that’s less murderous on the joint. And apparently takes too long to answer, because Kent’s head snaps up, and he points at him with the neck of the bottle.

“I went number– first. I went because I deserved it. Not because he— not because of what happened. Going first, going second, who gives a shit, right? Either way you’re going to a piece of shit team, so like, who cares. Just invented stuff for the media, give everyone something to talk about when it’s the middle of the off-season and everyone’s fucking bored.” It’s like he’s reciting something he’s memorized by rote, or been told so many times that the words have stamped themselves into his brain through repetition.

“Right,” Phil says.

Kent eyes him, then seems to realize that he’s still holding the bottle out. He pulls it back in, takes a pull, and doesn’t even grimace as the vodka goes down. _You just turned nineteen,_ Phil thinks, checks that train of thought before it gets too far. Shit, Phil certainly was drinking at nineteen, there’s no reason this should worry him.

“I’m no one’s consolation prize,” Kent says. He draws the back of his hand over his mouth. “I’m not this team’s second best.”

There’s a crash from inside, and a chorus of mixed laughter and shouts. Kent focuses on the door behind Phil for a second, then visibly decides he doesn’t want to get involved. He shifts back in the deck chair, the bottle loose in one hand.

“Jack’s not taking that from me,” Kent says. And flinches, closes his eyes, even though he’s the one who says the name that Phil’s been avoiding all night. “He doesn’t get that. Not when he’s taken—not when he won’t—”

“Won’t call you?” Phil asks, tentatively. Kent’s shoulders slump, and he’s back to staring at the bottle’s label again. “Kenny, I—he’s probably been through a lot, I don’t think it’s personal.”

“Nope,” Kent says dully. “It’s definitely personal. No other way it could be.”

“What does that mean?” Phil says, suddenly exasperated. With the impact of the press release, with the scene outside the car, with the stricken look on Kent’s face, with every bit of non-information Phil’s been given about this whole Jack Zimmermann thing, starting from the day Kent called their mother from a hospital in the coldest suburb of the Great White North.

“Fuck him, is what that means,” Kent snaps, eyes open and steady on Phil. “Fuck him for scaring the shit out of me, fuck him for _leaving_ me, and fuck him for just living the life back in his fucking mansion, while I’m out here all by myself!” he leans forward, kicks at the puck in front of him and only manages to catch it with the side of his shiny black dress shoe; it barely budges. “Fuck him for not answering my emails, fuck him for not calling me back, _fuck him_. I’ve got shit to say to him, I’ve _had_ shit to say to him, and he won’t even fucking hear me say it.”

Phil resists the urge to move the puck back to where it was, slide it back that inch so that the circle in front of Kent is complete. It’s not like it’s any kind of actually effective barrier. It’s not like there’s any sort of magical protective property to the union of cell phone, puck, and mystery box. He wants to do it anyway.

“Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say it to me,” Phil says. “I’m here, Kenny. I’m listening.”

Kent looks at him, and his mouth twitches, almost a smile. “Maybe,” he says.

What can he do with that? What can he do with the way Kent turns to look out at the desert before them, tipping the bottle in a salute to Phil without meeting his eyes before taking another sip? Maybe, what? Maybe he’ll tell Phil? Or maybe, Phil’s listening?

This isn’t the boy that Phil remembers from holidays, leave time, furloughs and quick moments crossing paths. He knows that kid. He knows _this_ kid. Just—not at this particular moment.

“What do you need to say?” Phil asks quietly.

Kent heaves out a sigh, one that sounds like he’s dragged it all the way up from the soles of his shoes. “Anything, I guess. Anything he wants to hear. Anything he wants me to say. That’s probably how it would actually go. Not like I ever say what I actually mean anyway, so.”

He hasn’t looked back at Phil, eyes still out at the lights of the city, though he’s blindly set the bottle down by his feet again. It doesn’t topple over, but it’s close.

“But I won’t _know_ what he wants me to say, until he fucking. Fucking answers the phone. And if he hasn’t, for. For almost a month. I thought—not too many other ways to take that.”

“Maybe he just needs a little more time,” Phil says.

Kent closes his eyes. “Nah,” he says, another flat contradiction offered up like obvious fact. “Not really. Not really how Jack does it.”

Quiet falls between them. Or as quiet as it can be, with a bassline thrumming through the glass, the murmur of voices and laughter carrying through still. Phil’s lost track of time, a little bit. But it’s got to be getting into to the far side of midnight. Still, from what Jeff had said, it doesn’t sound like this is the type of party where the cops get called to break it up. On top of the fact that it’s Las Vegas, where different rules probably apply.

“So, what’s this?” Phil asks, pointing at the black box. Admittedly, he’s ready for a change of subject. And also admittedly, he’s just curious.

Up close, it almost looks like the kind of thing you’d pack a necklace in, though the few and far between Tiffany boxes he’s handed to Rachel have never been such a somber color. “Someone give you a present?”

“It’s not for me,” Kent says. But he turns back to Phil, and picks up the box. Flips it open. “You’ll like this, check it out.”

He doesn’t extend the box towards Phil, just turns it to face him. Phil doesn’t take it, leans forward instead and squints through the gloom at the contents.

It’s a set of tags. Both like and unlike the ones at his own chest, the weight of them so familiar that he’s only aware of them in the rare moments when he takes them off. Two discs of metal on a chain, a name stamped into it, one side rough and jagged to the touch. But the quality of the metal is different, the shape of the tags themselves and the letters on it just a bit irregular. They look hand-stamped, like with a typewriter. In the vague light, Phil can make out the name: Solomon Shepherd. And two dates: 7-22-17, and 12-26-91.

“Cool, huh,” Kent’s head is tipped back in his chair, addressing the air above them. “Authentic World War I tags. Tracked them down through a collector. They’re the real deal, got the—I don’t know, whatever thing you get to prove they’re real. Piece of paper. He was a real guy. Navy, it’s got the USN on there. And that’s his thumb print on the back, no shit. They did that. Back then. That metal, same shit they used on the prop—propellers. No shit.”

“Didn’t know you were a history buff, Kenny,” Phil says, rubbing a tentative thumb over the sunken letters, trying to picture the man whose life was so like and unlike his own.

“I’m not,” Kent says, sounding too tired to be really annoyed. “Told you, it’s not for me.”

“So why do you have it?”

Kent goes quiet. His eyes are open, Phil can make out the motion of his eyelashes as he blinks, the shadow of his throat moving as he swallows. His foot kicks out again a little, but vaguely, at no particular target.

“I’m glad I didn’t go with the truck,” he says. “Probably not the best call. Jack had one in Rimouski kind of like it. Big red thing, kind of old, he got it from his dad. And like. Kept pussying out at weird moments, couldn’t really handle the snow. I used to— used to give him a lot of shit for that. Canadian car, I mean, he bought it in Canada, so. Plus he drives— drove— like a little old woman, I’m like, ‘Zimms, sometimes you just gotta _gun_ it, man, you’ve gotta give it some power and that’ll carry you through it,’ but he’d just go ‘yeah,’ and not floor it when he should and then get stuck in a stupid tiny fucking drift.”

Kent shifts, and sits up. Looks at the bottle consideringly, and then closes his eyes, puts his elbows on his knees and lets his chest sink between his shoulders.

“Big fucking truck, stupid tiny drift. Got a bunch of flats on the way to and from practice and games, because like, the roads are also garbage. So we’d just be stuck out there, waiting for AAA to show up and give us shit for not being able to change the tires ourselves. It wasn’t actually dangerous. We could probably’ve walked wherever we were going, most of the time. And it was always—“ his head falls forwards, brim eclipsing his face, Phil only able to see the smooth black seams of the hat. “—it was always warm enough in the truck.”

Phil waits for more. But it seems like Kent’s all talked out.

“Kenny,” he says softly, because he knows this, he was there for this. “You know how to change a tire.”

Kent looks up. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

And there it is. Phil wasn’t even aware he was waiting for it, braced for it, until they were already past it. Wasn’t sure what he was looking for, even, until it arrived.

Maybe there’s a way he would’ve expected this conversation to go, some sort of vague idea that these things tended to begin with an ‘I have something to tell you,’ gentle impressions from third-hand stories and the kind of TV shows he’s too tired to watch, at the end of the day. The sort of set script and watch-words that made everything this weekend, every hint at the truth, something he could dismiss, something he could deny, because it wasn’t how These Things Went.

But there’s a line. There’s a point at which dismissing and denying is downright ridiculous. And that point is Kent and Jack, alone together, making a freezing landscape warm.

“Right,” Phil says. “Got it.”

He doesn’t know what else to say.

His little brother doesn’t look like a kid who’s just confessed anything. He’s looking intently at Phil, but more with the focus of someone who’s just barely keeping you from splitting into two people. At least, Phil thinks that’s what it is, probably. When he raises a hand to run through his hair, he’s clearly forgotten that he’s got the hat on, and knocks it off his head.

“Jesus,” Kent says. And snorts. “Hey, Phil, trade you that bottle for the tags. You look like you could use a drink, huh?”

Phil cracks a cautious smile, but he picks up the bottle, sure now that it’s better off in his hand than in Kenny’s. He drops the chain into Kent’s waiting hand, his palm surprisingly steady under Phil’s fingers.

And, what the hell. Kent wasn’t wrong. Phil tips the bottle up, winces at the antiseptic burn, temporarily freezing the back of his tongue as the vodka makes its not-so-smooth way down.

“If you weren’t leaving tomorrow, the guys could really show you how to put that away,” Kent says casually. He’s turning the tags over and over, the chain tangling between his fingers. “Embarrassing, dude. Aren’t you supposed to be tough?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Phil says with a laugh, relieved. “Vodka is not a tough dude’s drink.”

“’Course not, it’s a drink for sissies,” Kent says. And then lets out a hearty ‘ha ha ha’ that sounds more like a sitcom laugh track.

He lurches to his feet abruptly, the cheap lawn chair squealing at the shift in weight, hauling himself up with a hand on the railing. He really does kick the puck, forgotten in front of him, and Phil’s heart leaps as it flips onto its side and begins to roll towards the balcony’s edge.

He lunges for it, bottle tumbling from his fingers and the remains of the Smirnoff spilling before him, soaking into the knees of his slacks as he slaps a hand down on the puck, sending it flat.

“Jesus—“ Phil breathes, and looks up.

Kent’s missed the melodrama entirely, and is wrapped up in one of his own. One hand’s still anchoring him to the railing, necessary given the way he’s swaying. The other is stretched out in front of him and into the open air, the tags dangling from his closed fist.

“Kenny,” Phil says, quiet and slow, like his brother’s a spooked horse in need of soothing. “What’re you doing?”

“I don’t need them,” Kent says quietly. “I don’t want them. He doesn’t want them. What the fuck have I been holding on to them for? What the fuck would I _keep_ holding on to them for?”

He looks down at Phil. With cold, near-sober clarity. And utterly transparent heartbreak. _My kid brother_ , Phil says, feeling the break echo in his own chest. _What the fuck, he’s just a kid_.

“I must be crazy, right?” Kent whispers. “Right? Like. I’ve gotta be crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, Kenny,” Phil says, sitting up, tucking the puck securely into his palm. “You’re not.”

“I’ve gotta be,” Kent clenches his jaw. “I hate this,” he says. “I fucking _hate_ this. I don’t want to be this—I don’t want this anymore.” He looks out again at the tags, swaying gently from his fist. The metal’s too old, too dull, to really reflect the light of the city back up at them. But it manages some shimmer, almost more of a glow.

He doesn’t know what to tell him. He doesn’t know what’s right, to send the tags tumbling down or to hold them close. He doesn’t know what would help Kent, what would fix what he’s only now learning is so broken.

He doesn’t know him. Phil doesn’t know Kent, not really. His own brother, and he doesn’t know him. The fracturing in Phil’s chest isn’t an echo this time, and pushing away that thought turns into pushing himself up, to stand next to Kent.

“You know what I’m going to say,” Phil says. “Because it’s what I always say, huh?”

“Keep going,” Kent says. And then, sounding tired. “Keep fighting.”

“Yeah,” Phil says.

“Yeah,” Kent breathes. And then, as abruptly as he’d stepped up to the rail, he steps back. He lets go of the railing as he brings the tags in to his chest. Anchorless, he rocks a little, stumbling into Phil’s side.

“Guess,” Kenny says, righting himself. “Guess it’s time for bed, probably.”

“Probably,” Phil says, bringing an arm up around Kent’s shoulders to support some of his weight. It’s a surprise, how broad Kenny is in the shoulders now. Still the runt, but he could hold his own now in the kind of scuffles he always lost when they were all kids. “Come on, I’ll kick the shit out of anyone who’s hooking up in your room.”

“Gross,” Kent says distantly, and they step back into the apartment.

~

Kent sits down on Phil’s bed as soon as they’re back inside, thumbing vaguely at his phone. Phil goes to grab him a glass of water, hoping he can push his way through the still-enthusiastically partying guests before Kent tries to make a call.

When he does make it back, Kent isn’t on the phone. He’s flopped back against the pillows, eyes closed, breathing heavily. He hasn’t even taken off his shoes, but he has slipped the tags over his head. They rest on the black fabric of his undershirt, soft points of dull light on his chest.

That’s not Kenny, and it never has been. There’s something more disturbing than Phil would have thought in it, Kenny wearing the kind of tags the rest of them have worn for years.

Phil pushes the thought away. He carefully takes off Kent’s shoes, though he doubts Kent would wake up even if he was less careful. And he leaves the glass on the bedside table, turning the lights off behind him, letting Kenny sleep.

~

Phil never got to have a home, the way Kenny and Max have. Not like they didn’t have _houses_ , as Mom and Dad’s work took them from Virginia to Arizona to Florida to North Carolina, Phil and Mike and Ben each taking their turn on the roller coaster from “why do I have to leave, I hate you,” to “whatever, sure, I’ll pack my stuff.”

New York was for keeps, was the plan and the promise. New York would be it, New York was a lock for the foreseeable future, that narrow house on the fringes of Poughkeepsie would be theirs until the nest was completely empty.

But it was already emptying, by that point. The excitement of permanence, of “staying until graduation,” a promise that could really be kept, wasn’t for Phil. He got that house in a collection of days per month, per year, and there was never going to be enough space in it for his own room.

So he shared with Kenny when he was home, Max temporarily tucking himself into Ben and Mike’s room, Phil tucking himself into a bed that was too small for him and too big for his littlest brother.

He’d get home late at night, planes and trains and cabs being what they were, and let himself into a sleeping house. Quietly past where Mom would be sitting up and pretending she wasn’t, as though she was surprised to find her oldest son coming through the door. Up the stairs and to the narrow room at the back. Kent passed out on top of his covers, fully dressed and with his shoes still on, like not taking them off would somehow keep him awake until when Phil got in.

Phil would slide off the shoes, marking how fast the sneakers were being changed out for a bigger size, when they’d used to fit in the palm of his hand. He’d tug a blanket over Kenny. And he’d collapse into Max’s bed and be asleep himself as soon as he shut his eyes.

~

It’s not a great feeling, to wake up dreading the fallout from what you did when you were drunk. What might be worse, Phil thinks, is waking up dreading the fallout from what someone _else_ did when they were drunk.

If he was the kind of guy who went in for hiding, maybe he’d stretch out the morning as long as possible. Snoop around Kent’s bedroom maybe, even though there’s nothing of interest in it except for a pile of audiobooks on CD. It’s basically a guest room, and Kenny’s never cared much about how the space around him was decorated.

The thought strikes him uneasily, and Phil feels ashamed for the “no wonder we never guessed,” that comes at him out of nowhere.

So even if he was the kind of guy who would hide from this, instead of the kind of guy who doesn’t hide from anything short of enemy fire and sometimes not even that, he could only stretch the hiding out so long.

Besides, he has a plane to catch. So he leaves the room, already hoping his expression is more blank than it feels.

The apartment’s unrecovered from last night’s party, to put it kindly. Phil steps over an abandoned pair of women’s white high heels just outside the bedroom door, and counts fifteen red Solo cups on his way to the kitchen. There’s a stack of six pizza boxes on the island counter, which someone must’ve called in after Phil had retreated to Kent’s room. Out of curiosity, Phil flips the lid of the top box open. Only two or three slices gone, out of a congealed and cold Hawaiian pie.

Pineapple on pizza. Phil wonders vaguely where Kenny would go for pizza out here. He wouldn’t order Hawaiian pizza from Domino’s, that’s for sure. Maybe there are things he doesn’t know about Kent, but he’s still pretty sure that he knows him at least _this_ well.

It’s a bizarre thought, and even more bizarre in how comforting it is.

The wreckage in the living room is a little more contained, in that someone at least has stacked the Solo cups on the low end tables, and there’s a white garbage bag sitting half-filled by the couch. Where Jeff is lying with a baseball cap on his head and the TV turned to a game – which would maybe be admirable fan devotion, if the TV wasn’t on mute and the cap wasn’t sitting squarely over his face. He might even be snoring. He might also still be in his shirt and slacks from last night.

Kent’s sitting in one of the big armchairs, chin in one hand and eyes on the TV. His expression is glazed with either a hangover or boredom, and both are equally likely— for as much as they all grew up sports crazy, baseball was never the Parson family’s game.

His hair looks like it’s still damp from a shower, a towel hanging over his shoulders. And he’s dressed, dark jeans and a sharp-looking blue plaid button down, both of them a tighter fit than he’d normally go for.

“Hey,” Phil says, and Kent looks over at him with a smile. Something vague about it, half-shaped, and there’s next to nothing of the real Kent Parson behind it.

“Morning,” Kent says quietly, voice low so as to not wake up his roommate.

“Those new?” Phil asks, gesturing at the outfit. It’s something to say, other than ‘so hey, about your junkie boyfriend…’

Kent looks down as though he doesn’t know what clothing he’d put on, and smooths a hand over his chest, straightening the lines of plaid.

“Old, actually,” Kent says. “I got them when I moved out here. Because—I don’t know, because the two of them together topped over $800, I guess.”

Phil blinks.

“Still, they didn’t feel quite right, not very ‘me,’ so they’ve been hanging out in the bottom of a drawer for months,” Kent sighs and gets to his feet. “But I had a realization this morning, you know? They’re not _going_ to feel right. Not unless I _make_ them. And I think they look pretty good, actually.”

They do. But it’s like some kind of science fiction B-movie, the kind of thing that he and Kent would stay up and watch together when Phil was home and on babysitting duty, and the house was empty except for the two of them. He’s seen this movie, the one where the hero is replaced by someone who looks just like him. Who’s slick, suave, has a way with words and with the ladies. But who isn’t the hero. Not really.

Phil always hated those kinds of movies. Kent, in retrospect, loved them.

“I did get some shopping done this morning though,” Kent says with a smile.    

Phil checks his watch. His eyebrows shoot up. “Lots of places open, before nine in the morning?”

“It’s Vegas,” Kent says, getting to his feet. “There’s always something open, any time. But I didn’t go to the mall, or anything. I don’t have to do that, if I don’t want to.”

“Okay,” Phil says.

“Flight’s at one, right?” Kent says, whipping the towel off his shoulders and giving his hair a quick rub, before dropping it onto the armchair behind him. “You all packed? I’ve got to show you what I picked up.”

“Kent,” Phil says. “Can we talk about—“

The fake quiet calm burns off of Kent in an instant, eyes narrowing, shoulders coming up, and his hands actually curling into fists. For a crazy moment, Phil thinks that maybe Kent’s going to take a run at him. Kent takes a step forward, as though maybe he thinks that he will too.

But Kent’s eyes cut from Phil to the sleeping Jeff, and he shakes his head sharply.

“Grab your bags,” Kent says, all steel. His hands are still in fists. “We’ll talk outside.”

~

The heat of the desert hits Phil like a slap, as soon as the automatic doors to Kent’s building slide open in front of them. He’s not the one who should be feeling hungover, but he’s the one who staggers as though a weight’s just been thrown over him, and Kent steps forward into the sunlight.

They left the apartment in silence, rode the elevator down to the first floor in silence. Phil had some things he’d meant to say. He’d thought about them after he’d put Kent to bed, and after waking up this morning. But he can’t figure out where to start now, or how to break the silence, or Kent’s bright smile.

A car slides up in front of them. Calling it a car is like calling a thoroughbred racehorse a mule, and describing the car’s motion as a slide would be like calling the inexpressible power of that horse streaking across the turf a trot.

Phil whistles, long and low.

“Here she is,” Kent says, nodding to the doorman who steps out of the driver’s side and palming him a bill, though by the grin on the man’s face the tip is unnecessary. “Not bad, huh?”

“Not bad?” Phil drops his overnight bag to the concrete (it’s quickly picked up by the doorman and stowed in the trunk). “This is a _car_ , man.”

“It’s _my_ car,” Kent says. “Told them to pick me out whatever went fastest and looked the sharpest, and fuck if they didn’t deliver on both counts.”

A Porsche, Phil notes, afraid to even lay a hand on the gleaming side of the thing. Benny’s going to shit himself.

But Phil frowns. “What about the truck? You change your mind about the pickup?”

Kent’s smile twists downwards into a grimace for a moment, before he rights it and steps around Phil to the other side of the car, his back to his brother. “That was just a dumb idea. You really going to try and tell me it would have been the better one to go with?”

“If that’s what you wanted,” Phil says, all of the thoughts he’d lined up at six this morning struggling to pack themselves into one irrelevant sentence.

Kent laughs, and turns to face Phil. “Yeah, you would say that. But you’re still looking at this car like you want to fuck it, so don’t think I’m fooled.”

“Hey,” Phil says.

“Whatever,” Kent rolls his eyes, slides his sunglasses on and taps a finger on the roof of the car. “This is better than a truck. Reality is what it is. Pretending anything else is a waste of our time. Get in the car.”

Phil does. He’s not sure who he wants to kick more, himself or his little shit brother.

“You’re a big man now,” He says, because _fuck_ this anyway. “So who knows. Maybe you’ll get the truck too, little way down the line. You could.”

Kent sets the car roaring back into life, and slides on a pair of sunglasses. He looks at Phil, and Phil gets nothing out of Kent’s eyes past his own distorted reflection.

“I don’t want to talk about the fucking truck anymore, Phil,” Kent says.

“It’s not so easy to let go of these things,” Phil says, tone ticking up and words running together, sounding stupid and young to his own ears. “You can’t just have an idea like that and hold on to it, and then throw it away. You can’t just toss that out like that, and there’s no reason you should have to. Don’t write it off, is what I’m saying. It could happen, you can’t just stop wanting it to.”

“It probably _will_ happen, and that’s exactly the fucking problem!” Kent snaps, whipping off the sunglasses and throwing them at the windshield. The sound is so loud, Phil almost expects it to shatter the windshield.

He doesn’t flinch at much, but he flinches at that.

They haven’t even pulled out from in front of Kent’s building. The door slides open and shut behind them, residents and guests coming and going and stepping into their own gleaming cars, shining cabs, everything bouncing the bright morning sun and bright Vegas lights back into Phil’s eyes. The A/C is cranked up high enough that he can feel the sweat drying at the back of his neck, and the sensation is uncomfortable. Everything about this car is uncomfortable, now that he’s in it.

“Why, though?” He asks, quietly. “Why is that the problem, Kenny?”

Kent glares at him. “No one calls me that anymore,” he hisses, almost too low and vicious to be heard, leaning across the gearshift and getting up in Phil’s face. “Okay? No one.”

He sits back, and sighs. Presses at his eyes, clears his throat, and looks viciously hungover for the first time this morning.

“Sorry,” Phil says. “Kent. I’m sorry.”

Kent glances at him, and reaches for the sunglasses again. He twists the key, roars the car back to life and away from the building at last. It draws a few envious looks on the way out, which Kent doesn’t appear to notice.

“It’s the problem because I know I won’t be able to let it go,” Kent says finally, answering a question that Phil’s practically forgotten he ever asked, busy staring out the window in quiet misery. “I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about— about the truck. And probably I will get one, for all the fucking difference it’ll make. That’s why it’s the problem.”

He doesn’t look at Phil once. Phil decides to fucking think before he speaks this time, but since he can’t actually think of anything at all, he doesn’t say another word.

~

It’s weird how something can seem both inevitable and still surprising. Kent and hockey, that was never a brief fling, never a hobby, never something he just did after school to kill the time. It was everything, it was all hours, it ate up his time and his attention and that seemed to be just how he liked it.

But it was still surprising, when that road wound its way to where it had always been pointed. When the medal hit Kent’s chest at World Juniors, when he lifted the Memorial Cup over his head, when the jersey for the Las Vegas Aces settled on top of his shoulders.

“I can’t believe it,” Mom had said from next to him, and Phil wasn’t sure if it was the catch in her throat or the sudden pressure of her fingers locked around his arm that startled him more. Mom, always so stoic and steady, always a smooth surface of calm for the rest of them – her unit, her sons, all of them – to bounce off of and not leave a visible scratch. She was looking up at Kenny with her eyes wide, chin trembling, and Phil didn’t recognize either tell well enough to be sure if they came from happiness, or something else. “Look at him. I can’t believe it.”

Phil put his hand over hers, and did look at Kent. At the smile. At the way he looked out over the crowd, eyes settling on his family – all of them, for once, a miracle in and of itself – but moving on to keep scanning the faces packing the stadium.

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I can’t believe it either.”

~

There’s no real way to have a significant conversation when you’re being dropped off at an airport. Maybe if Kent had actually parked the car to walk Phil in, he could have tried. But Kent’s clearly pissed, and just puts the Porsche into park in front of the departures drop-off, doesn’t even turn the engine off.

He taps his fingers on the wheel though, head bowed. “Thanks for coming,” Kent mumbles. “It—I’m glad you came. It meant a lot.”

“I’m glad I did too,” Phil says quietly. “You played a hell of a game, runt. Congratulations. You’re really in it now, huh?”

Kent smiles wanly. “I’m really in it,” he says. “The NHL, as advertised.”

“Is it really?”

Kent snorts. “Well. Kind of.”

It’s time for him to get out, to grab his bags and get through security and onto that plane. It’s time, and he knows it is, but if he just steps out of this car without saying anything, he really will hate himself for it.

“Kent,” he says, and the way Kent settles his shoulders back against the seat is a clear enough indicator that he knows where this is going. “You said some things, last night.”

“I probably did,” Kent says. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Phil says. He hesitates. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I didn’t think—I didn’t know—“

Kent’s expression doesn’t change. “You weren’t supposed to know. No one was supposed to know. No one _is_ supposed to know.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” and he immediately closes his eyes, but not quickly enough to see how Kent’s expression twists.

“Of course you won’t,” he hears Kent say.

“Kent—“

“You didn’t ask, so you won’t tell. That’s how that goes, right?”

He opens his eyes. He knows what Kent’s doing, is familiar with this particular bit of childish slapping back as means of deflection, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still sting.

“Hey,” Phil says. “That’s not fair.”

“Maybe not,” Kent says, sneering. “But it’s true. House rules, right?”

Phil opens his mouth to snap back, then closes it again.

“Fuck this flight,” he says. “Let’s go out to lunch. Grab a few tacos, maybe get some hair of the dog. You can tell me all about—tell me all about Vegas. About being here. And, you can tell me about Canada too. Juniors, the draft, about—about Jack. Everything I’ve missed.”

Kent’s sneer slips into uncertainty, and he leans back. Phil angles his shoulders towards him, encouraged.

“There are other flights, there’s nothing I can’t put off,” he says. “It’s bullshit that I’m only here for the day. It’s bullshit that I’ve missed so much as it is, but I want to make it right. I want to fix it. What do you say, Ken—Kent? How about it?”

He’s not sure which part of that was the mistake. He’s not sure what it was that flipped the uncertainty around, and solidified the blank green wall behind Kent’s eyes. But Kent’s already got his hand back on the gear shift, looking through Phil like he’s already in the air.

“There’s nothing to fix,” he says smoothly.

Phil snorts. “Come on,” he says. “It’s okay, you can—“

“There’s nothing that can be fixed,” Kent says evenly. “And it’s pissing me off to hear you pretend like you know anything about it.”

Phil swallows hard. _So tell me_ , he thinks. He’s got more to say, he’s got more he’s been thinking, but he can’t swallow past the lump in his throat, and how much Kent is not eight years old anymore, and how much he wishes he could just go back to that kid and keep him from ever touching a fucking hockey puck.

Maybe that wouldn’t fix anything. Maybe Kent’s right. Maybe Phil doesn’t have a fucking clue what would.

“Call me when you land,” Kent says, putting the car into drive, even though Phil’s still sitting next to him, seatbelt buckled. “Or text me, whatever.”

“Okay,” Phil says. “Thanks for the ride. It’s—“ he unbuckles the belt, swings it off his shoulder with maybe a little more force than he needs to. “It’s a hell of a car.”

“It’ll get me where I need to go,” Kent agrees, with a smooth smile. “See you later, Phil.”

~

Phil calls, when he’s back in Florida. After Rachel’s picked him up, double-taking at the look on his face as soon as he’s through security. After he’s held her close to him, her head tucked under his chin, as she uncertainly pats him on the shoulder when the hug goes on for too long. After she leaves him alone, when they’re home, giving him the space he needs without him having to ask for it.

The heat feels different here. It’s the kind of humidity that brushes against your skin as you move through it, feeling like you’re swimming when you’re on dry land. It’s not the draining, dry heat of the desert. It makes Phil want to fall back on the bed, and go to sleep.

He doesn’t. He can’t. He has his phone in his hand, turning it over and over the way Kent had been. He realizes that he hadn’t seen Kent pick it up once, after last night. He wonders what Kent’s done with it, if he went so far as to throw it away, toss it from the window the way he wanted to toss away those tags.

He can just get a new one, if he did. A shiny new phone, to go with his shiny new clothes and his shiny new car.

For a moment, Phil wants to call Max. Who saw Jack and Kent together. Who was there. Who, in retrospect, might already know everything that Phil is just learning. Might have known, for months. Does their mom? Does Dad? Do Ben and Mike have any idea?

He lets out a long breath. He’s never going to know. Because he’s never going to ask. He’ll never be able to. And every time he sees them, every time he calls to check in, he’ll wonder. Wonder who knows what. Wonder what he can say. Wonder how he can say Kent’s name, tell them he’s okay, without the whole truth of it bleeding right through the phone.

He’ll have to. That’s the only option.

He’s kept this secret for half a day. Kent’s kept it for nineteen years. How the fuck has Kent managed it? How is the kid still standing at all, let alone standing with so many flashing lights shining straight on him?

There’s only one person he can call, right now. So he does.

Kent doesn’t pick up.


End file.
